The plan of God is to pour His abundant love; everything He is and everything He has and all His peace and His joy; His plan is to pour that out upon your life. And that … that’s why He’s sent the Holy Spirit.

How Thirsty are You?

We are starting a new series this week on Christianityworks called “The Holy Spirit and Me”. For most of my life I haven’t been a Christian. My early memories of church as a child were hard pews and filtered light through yellow windows and the Latin Mass and then as I grew up, a German Mass. And for me as a child, it felt like the whole thing was just droning on. I don’t mean to criticise but for me as a kid, the whole Christianity/religion thing – it just didn’t work. It all seemed pretty much irrelevant.

In fact, I remember in church, sitting as a young child, I knew my father could wiggle his ears and I thought, “Maybe I can do it too” and the biggest thing I got out of that time – sitting still for me for an hour on end was just a terrible thing as a kid – was learning to wiggle my ears. And as I grew up, I’m your typical baby-boomer – you know, I was into career, into money, into having things and I discovered I was very good at what I did so, I got onto the treadmill of life and the whole religion and rules and church thing, by and large, for me, was just irrelevant – particularly as a baby-boomer.

So when I came to that time in my life, about eleven years ago, when God started to stir things around inside of me; began to develop a sense of my own spirituality, I thought, “I only want this if it is real, if it’s relevant, if it’s here and now, if it makes a difference.” The notion of church and religion to me was vacuous and out of date and irrelevant. If there was a God I wanted to know Him and if not I thought, “I can do without all that other palaver” – you know.

I don’t know if you have been at functions or events or cocktail parties when you are standing around and you have a discussion with someone and it’s all superficial and you wander off and go and get another drink and you talk to someone else at all this superficial level. It’s so different to having a great meal with some close friends where there is a depth and a reality to the relationship. And I guess to me, that was the distinction between the whole churchy/religiousy thing on the one hand, which I saw as superficial and the depth of relationship on the other which is what I wanted with this God – with this Jesus, if He was who He said He was. A friend is someone who sticks by you through thick and thin. A friend accepts you for who you are, good and bad.

So I thought, “If I am going to be a Christian I want a deep, passionate, real relationship with God.” I remember having a cup of coffee not many months after I gave my life to Christ and this man was my pastor – a wonderful man – and he saw how excited, how passionate I was about this new relationship that I had discovered with Jesus.

And he said to me, “Berni, you know, it’s not always going to be like that. There will be days when it’s bad,” and in a sense he’s right, there are some tough days in life. But I went home and I was really angry with what he had said and I remember praying, I said, “God, if I am going to be a Christian I want to do it with my all and I want it to be a real, powerful relationship and I want to know this peace and this joy and this love and this excitement every day of my life.”

Now, there are three types of people in this world – those who enjoy a relationship like that with God – and I would encourage you to stick with us today because it will be an encouragement to listen to what we are talking about with the Holy Spirit. There are those who believe in Jesus – the second type – but they don’t have that sort of relationship. Somehow the Christianity thing is hollow; it’s empty. The third…the third are people who don’t yet believe in Jesus, who don’t have that relationship and maybe you are asking, “Well, does He have anything to offer?”

So today let me encourage you – we are going to open up a box here and look at what Jesus says about the subject of having a relationship with Him and for you to evaluate that and decide for yourself whether that’s the sort of passionate relationship you would like to have.

Way back in the Old Testament, to the prophet Jeremiah, when God’s people, the people of Israel were going through some really tough times – God always seems to show up for Israel during the tough times. And He makes really powerful and far-reaching and exciting promises and this is one of those times. He says:

Look, after all this is through, I will put My Word inside you. I’ll write it on your heart and I will be your God and you will by my people and you won’t have to teach each other and say to each other, ‘Know God’ because you will know Me. From the least to the greatest” says the Lord, “I’ll forgive you and I’ll remember your sin no more and you will love me.

I love that passage because that’s God heart; that’s God passion; that is God saying to me and God saying to you, “I want to have a relationship with you, I want to be close to you, I want for you to know Me.” You know, it’s one thing to know God; it’s another thing to know God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our spirit, to be consumed with the wonder and the awe of who God is.

There is another beautiful passage in the Book of Joel – another one of the Old Testament prophets:

And God says, “After all these things, I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy.

This picture of God wanting to have a relationship; this picture of God pouring out His Spirit – you know, He’s not doing it with an eye-dropper; He’s not doing it with a little cup, God wants to pour out His Holy Spirit.

That’s why this week we are starting a series called, “The Holy Spirit and Me”. Who is this Holy Spirit? What’s His job? What’s He like? What does He do? What’s my relationship? What’s the whole point of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit? So right now I’d ask you how thirsty are you? How much do you want to have a relationship with God through the Holy Spirit?

Intimacy with God

We are going to have a look today at what Jesus had to say about this person, the Holy Spirit and we are going to John chapter 14 – if you have got a Bible, grab it and open it up – the fourth Book in the New Testament – John chapter 14. Now Jesus has spent three and a half years with His disciples; they were fishermen and tax collectors and they had seen Him do the most amazing miracles; they had heard Him preach powerful sermons but the time was drawing near for Him to be crucified.

Now Jesus was a religious subversive. The religious establishment of the day was into rules and religion and pomp and ceremony and hypocrisy and oppression and they had done deals with the Roman occupying power and Jesus … Jesus comes along and threatens that. He is like a breath of fresh air. He hangs around with common people, like you and me. He stands up for the oppressed ones and the marginalised ones. He does miracles and He shows up the establishment and so they plot to kill Him.

So His disciples have this sense of fear and loss. He is telling them about it and they are wondering, “Well what about my life? I mean, this Jesus who has been doing these amazing things, He says He is going to be crucified – what then?”

So this little rag-tag group of fishermen and tax collectors and the people that God has chosen to establish His church are about to experience the deep loss of Jesus on the cross. And Jesus comes along and promises them something and that’s what we are going to read now in John’s Gospel chapter 14, beginning at verse 15. Let’s have a bit of a read. He says:

If you love me you will keep my commandments and I will ask My Father and He will give you another advocate; another comforter to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive because they don’t see Him or know Him but you know Him because He dwells and abides with you and He will be in you. I won’t leave you orphaned; I’m coming to you.

In a little while the world won’t see me any longer but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in My Father and you are in me and I am in you. They who have My commandments and keep them, are those who love Me and those who love Me will be loved by My Father and I will love them and reveal Myself to them. Judas – not Iscariot, another Judas – said to Him “Lord, how is it that you reveal yourself to us and not to the world?” And Jesus answered him “Those who love me will keep My Word and My Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

And then He goes on to say:

Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. I don’t give it to you the way the world gives. Don’t let your hearts be troubled and don’t let them be afraid.

This is a promise from Jesus in this tough time, just like those Old Testament promises we looked at earlier. This is God showing up in a difficult, tough time, making beautiful, wonderful, powerful promises and here He promises the Holy Spirit. He says:

If you love Me you will keep My commandments and I will ask Dad and He will give you another one; another advocate.

“If you love Me …” Is He looking for perfection? No! Jesus knows we are not perfect but He is saying if you live your life for Me – if you really love Me, the things that I have taught you, the things that you have heard, the things that I’ve said are really important – My wisdom, love your enemy, love your neighbour, don’t judge other people – all that stuff, He says if you will do that, I’ll ask Dad and He will send you another counsellor. Now if you have a Bible, this word is translated in different ways – Counsellor or Advocate or Comforter “like Me”. In fact, the words that Jesus uses there mean “just like Me” – another one “just like Me”.

So all of a sudden we know something about this Holy Spirit that He is promising. The Holy Spirit is just like Jesus. Ever wondered what the Holy Spirit is like because when we say, “God the Father”, we go, “Well, I can imagine what a good dad is?” We haven’t all had good dads but we can all imagine what a good father is like and so we look at God as “Father” and we go, “Yep, I get that bit.”

“God the Son”, well, we understand sonship and we understand Jesus because we can pick up at least four books in the Bible – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Gospels – and read exactly what He was like and how He behaved and how He reacted and what He said. But kind of getting your mind and your heart around the Holy Spirit is … it’s a whole bunch more difficult isn’t it? And here Jesus tells us what the Holy Spirit is like – He is just like Jesus.

In the Old Testament, remember we read earlier, the promise in Joel:

I will pour out My Spirit on everyone.

And Jesus is saying, “It’s about to happen folks!” God is God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – we don’t understand that fully – three persons, one God and Jesus is saying, “It’s about to happen, guys. I know I’m going to be crucified but sometime real soon I’m going to follow-up on My promise to pour out My Spirit and I’m going to pour My Spirit out on you and if you love Me, if you believe in Me, I will come and make My home in You. I’m in Dad and you will be in Me and Dad and I will come and make our homes in you.”

Let’s look at it again:

This Spirit of truth whom the world can’t receive because they don’t know Him and they don’t see Him but you do – you know Him because He abides with you.

See, “abides” is such a strong word – it doesn’t mean “shack up”, it doesn’t mean “visit”, it doesn’t mean “have a cup of coffee together”, it means “to be with us forever” and that’s what Jesus said:

I will give you another advocate to be with you forever. And we will come and make our home with you. If you love Me and keep My Word, My Dad will love you and He and I, through the Holy Spirit, will make our home with you.”

Up until then, the presence of God had been understood to be inside the temple in Jerusalem, in the Holy of Holies and no one could come close to God and here in Jesus, God comes close to us. And Jesus says, “It gets better than this – we are about to get much closer because when I pour My Spirit out, I will be dwelling with you and living in you.”

In fact, He goes on to say, in John chapter 16:

It’s to your advantage that I go away because if I don’t go away I won’t be pouring My Spirit out on you and having My Spirit is so much better.

What an amazing plan Jesus has for us! What an awesome plan to pour out His Spirit and we will pick up and look at that plan just a little bit more next.

Jesus Comes Home

Well, God does have an amazing plan for us to have a relationship with Him that is intimate and real and here and now. I remember talking to a young man at a church I was at a few years ago – I was running an ALPHA course, which is a course to introduce people to Jesus and what Christianity is all about. And this man was a young Jewish lawyer by the name of David and we were talking about the Holy Spirit – we were talking about exactly this passage that we’ve just read. It says:

I will come and make My home in you. My Spirit will abide with you forever.

And I was explaining it is kind of like God moves in. God moves into our lives, into our hearts and into our spirits and into our souls and He is with us every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of eternity. And this young lawyer said ‘Woe, that’s a bit of an invasion of privacy isn’t it?’ I guess it is … I guess it is when a man a woman gets married, you know, all of a sudden there in each other’s space and they are in each other’s lives and they share the same bed and they share every room in the house. It is kind of an invasion of privacy but it’s God’s plan. Not for religion, not for rules:

If you love Me you will keep My commandments and I will come and make My home in you. I will love you, I will show Myself to you.

It says here in this passage we have just been reading. When Jesus said:

It is to your advantage that I go away so that I can send you the Holy Spirit.

What He was meaning was this: Jesus was God in the flesh and being a man He had a physical limitation – He could only be in one place at one time but the Holy Spirit doesn’t have that problem. The Holy Spirit … God the Spirit can be in me and in you and in a trillion other people at exactly the same time. The Holy Spirit is God with me and God with you, 24/7. And when Judas asks the question in verse 22 of chapter 14, when he says:

Lord how is it that You reveal Yourself to us and not to the world?

That is a good question. Jesus answer is:

I will make My home with you. I will abide with you.

God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit will be on your journey with you. Not in a church, not in a building, not in a temple, not in an air-conditioned heaven, I’ll be on the journey with you through thick, through thin, through up, through down, through plenty, through not enough, through fire, through storm, Jesus is in that place with us.

But this isn’t for everyone; this isn’t for the world; this isn’t for people who say, “Well, you know something, I’m going to live my life my way and Jesus can be my little lap dog; my little puppy who does tricks and helps me when I need Him to.” No, this is on God’s terms – God is God.

If you love Me you will keep My commandments and I will ask Dad and He will give you another advocate just like Me to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot accept.

If we want to race off and live our lives contrary to God’s will, Jesus is saying “I’m sorry, but this isn’t for you. I want to give you My Spirit, I want to move in, I want to dwell with you, I want you to see Me, I want to reveal Myself to you through the Spirit of God, but you know something, it’s on God’s terms because God is God.

And sometimes we think, “Well, what will that mean? What will I have to do?” And we think, “Well, that’s God’s problem; God will teach us, God will show us when we invite Him in.” And that’s exactly what Jesus says. Pick it up in chapter 14, verse 25:

I have said these things to you while I am still with you but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you.

What a great plan! What an awesome plan! It’s so scary sometimes to contemplate this Person, the Holy Spirit and think what’s it going to mean? What do I have to give up? And all the time what the Spirit brings is joy and peace and an intimate relationship with God that we can’t even begin to imagine until He does that work in us.

And when He does that, He changes us. We get addicted to His joy. I’m addicted to the peace that the Holy Spirit brings. That’s why I spend time with God; that’s why I do what I do. I just love Him and when we do that somehow He changes us. You know those things that you’ve been trying to change in yourself all your life – I have them too. When we draw close to Him, that flame burns and somehow, all that rubbish just burns away, day-by-day, week-by-week, year-by-year. So it’s not a self-help programme, its God changing us.

For me when I accepted Jesus I did it holus-bolus. Like the disciples, it was a time of loss and fear and loneliness for me eleven years ago. When I accepted Him the pain didn’t go away straight away – I still had ups and downs – but God blessed me so greatly with a beautiful wife and daily I live in His presence and day after day after day He is changing me and touching me and guiding me and moulding me and it’s the Holy Spirit … God the Holy Spirit in me. And God the Holy Spirit in you who wants to do this; who wants to show us Jesus and tell us how wonderful He is.

This is what Jesus says in chapter 16, beginning at verse 14 about the Holy Spirit:

The Holy Spirit will glorify Me because He will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine and for this reason I said to you that He will take what is mine and declare it to you.

The plan of God is to pour His abundant love, everything He is and everything He has and all His love and His peace and His joy – His plan is to pour that into your life and my life through the Holy Spirit.

Father, I pray that as we have been in Your Word today Your Spirit would stir us up – You would give us a hunger and a thirst and a desire to be filled with Your Holy Spirit and I pray Father God in Jesus name, that You would do exactly that. 

So often we look in the mirror and realise, that we’re simply not worthy to come before the throne of grace. And yet, because of Jesus, nothing more needs to be done for you and me to walk boldly before God into His throne room and say, “Father, I love You; I want to be in Your presence.” Nothing more needs to be done!

Experiencing the Truth

These days we don’t just want to know God – we just don’t want to know Him in our heads but we want to experience God and historically, as we look back, Christians have made, I guess, two extreme mistakes in living their lives out with God. The first is that they focus just on truth – truth as head knowledge, studying the Bible, knowing lots of things, getting doctrine sorted out in their heads but you know, that ends up being really dry and there is no joy or peace in that head knowledge and it becomes like “religion”.

The other extreme – right at the other end of the scale, people have said, “You know, we are rejecting that, we are sick of that kind of dry, “head knowledgy” kind of “God” truth. And we want to experience God – it was a reaction to the dryness of the head knowledge. And so those Christians kind of emphasise God’s wonderful spiritual gifts – prophesy and healing and worship and that’s really exciting.

But there is a risk that you do that and you de-emphasise the truth. And that form of Christianity ends up becoming kind of whacky and unreliable and at its worst, emotional manipulation. But somewhere in the middle … somewhere in the middle there is an answer. Somewhere in the middle there is God’s Word and His truth and all of His goodness but also the spiritual reality of experiencing who God actually is in the middle of life.

And you know, when you look at Jesus, Jesus lived in that middle ground. At times in His ministry it was full of emotion; it was from His heart – you know, when He was healing lepers, when He was weeping over Lazarus, when He was weeping over Jerusalem. And at other times in His ministry, He taught on the hard issues – the Sermon on the Mount, the hypocrisy of the religious leaders. Jesus was in the middle ground – He believed in the truth of God’s Word and yet He lived it out in a reality that was, well, so real; so human, so Jesus.

In Matthews Gospel chapter 4, verse 23, it says this:

Jesus went through Galilee teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom and healing every disease and every sickness among the people and so His fame spread through all of Syria.

See, Jesus was into, yes, teaching and preaching and knowing God’s Word. But He was into touching people’s lives and healing them and changing them and bringing them new life as well. And because of both of those things, His fame spread – people came from far and wide.

It’s really funny – if we try and just stick to Biblical truth alone; that sort of very head-knowledge kind of truth, we can end up missing out on who God really is. We can end living out a faith which is “religious”, which is rule based, which is critical, which is, I don’t know, it’s not freedom.

On the other hand, if we end up just in the “experience” camp, we can end up right off the rails because God’s truth about who He is and what He wants us to do and how He wants us to live our lives out – God’s truth is so important. And sometimes you will hear a preacher from one camp criticising a preacher from another camp and I’m thinking, “What’s that about?” They stare at each other across this divide and the Jesus that I know; the Jesus that you discover in the Bible was a Jesus who passionately believed in the truth of God’s Word and a Jesus who passionately lived out that truth in such a real way.

This Jesus laid all of His glory aside, even though He was the Son of God, and He walked on this earth as a man and yet He had such a wonderful and powerful and dynamic relationship with His Father in heaven through the Spirit. Jesus used to get up early in the morning and go out on His own and pray because He had this wonderful, real relationship with God in heaven.

Last week we looked at what Jesus said to His disciples on this subject. In John chapter 14, beginning at verse 15, He said:

If you love Me you will keep My commandments and I’ll ask My Dad and He will give you another advocate – this is the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive because it doesn’t see Him and it doesn’t know Him but you know Him because He abides in you. Those who love Me will keep My Word and My Dad will love them and we will come and make our home with them.

Isn’t that beautiful? Being a Christian is loving Jesus and loving Jesus is knowing the truth and obeying Him. And then we experience Him because He says:

If you love Me you will keep My commandments and I will ask Dad and He will give you the Holy Spirit and we will come and live with you.

You will experience God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwelling in us through His Spirit – every minute of every hour of every day. Come on, that’s fantastic! And He says:

You in Me and Me in you.

So for Jesus, knowing God is not just knowing the truth, it’s about intimacy as well – a real experience of who God is. But there is a problem with that … the problem that we have is the problem of sin.

If you love Me you will keep My commandments.

What do we do about that problem? How do we get over that problem, to have this powerful, wonderful relationship with Jesus through the Holy Spirit? We will have a look at that next.

I Have a Problem

Well, Jesus promised that following Him and being a Christian wasn’t just about head knowledge of the truth but about an intimate relationship with Him. And in this series called, “The Holy Spirit and Me” we are looking at this Spirit of wisdom and truth, as Jesus called Him; the Holy Spirit and experiencing the joy and the peace in an intimate relationship with God – but our problem, as we looked earlier, is the problem of “If you love Me you will obey Me.”

If you love Me you will obey Me.

And you and I, in our nature are not very good at obeying. And I confess not so many years ago I used to have a problem with this. You know, Christians used words like “sin” and “repent” and “Jesus said repent because the Kingdom of God has come near” – to tell you the truth, to me it was all out of date and anachronistic and old fashioned and rubbish. Come on, what’s this repent and sin business? If it feels good, do it!

We live in an “anything goes kind of world”. I mean a woman looks at having an abortion and she says, “Well, it’s my body, it’s my choice!” If it feels good, do it! That’s the world we live in. We are programmed for self-indulgence today. In the same way as our grandparents coming out of a depression and a world war, were programmed for self-discipline and austerity.

On the one hand we want it all, on the other hand we ignore the human cost of this sort of a life – divorce and abortion and marriage breakdown and breakdown in relationships and loneliness and … you know it’s a law of life that for any relationship to bring satisfaction and joy, the people who participate in that relationship have to pay a price.

Marriage is like that! Before I met my wife Jacqui, I came and went as I pleased and then we went through a courtship and more of my time was involved in relationship with her and we went through an engagement and more of my time was involved and then we were married. And once we were married, I could no longer come and go as I pleased. I could no longer make all of my own decisions. I could no longer spend all of my money on everything that I wanted.

Now that sounds like oppression – oppressed? No way! This man is liberated – liberated to enjoy my life as Jacqui’s husband, in a relationship that is so wonderful with her. But there is a cost – there is a daily cost in that I cannot come and go as I please anymore and that takes some adjustment but that’s the price of a wonderful relationship.

And the same is true with God. A relationship with God follows the same principle but it is hard because all those other things that we want to do is the stuff that God calls “sin” – stealing, pulling other people down, being dishonest, the bad stuff but giving them up can be hard because it’s not in our nature to give up the things that we don’t want to give up because we are selfish.

And the Apostle Paul has exactly this same problem – if you have a Bible, grab it. We are going to Romans chapter 7, beginning at verse 14 through to verse 21. This is what he says:

We know that the law is spiritual but I’m of the flesh – I am sold into slavery under sin. I don’t understand why I do things because I don’t do what I want but I do the very thing that I hate. Now if I do what I don’t want, I agree, the law is good but in fact, it is no longer I that do it but the sin that dwells in me.

For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that’s within my flesh. I can will what is right, I just can’t do it. For I do not do the good I want but the evil that I don’t want is what I do. Now if I do what I don’t want it is no longer I that do it but the sin that dwells in me. So I find this to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.

In other words, Paul is torn. He is torn between what he wants and making the sacrifices in living his life for God. Now I praise God that Paul has this same problem because here is a man who wrote thirteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. God had a big role for Paul to play. Halleluiah! – Paul has the same problem that I do and the same problem that you do.

Have you ever felt like Paul? You want to do the right thing but some days we just can’t. What’s the answer? What’s the solution? I remember Nicky Gumble – you may have watched Nicky Gumble or heard him speak on the ALPHA series.

He tells a wonderful story of an old woman whose funeral he had to do and she was a woman who lived on the streets. She carried all her belongings around in plastic bags and she just lived on the streets and she was a street person. And when it came to her funeral he discovered that she was a multi, multi millionaire – she had some great inheritance but she couldn’t come to the point of taking all those bags of rubbish and throwing them away and going and living in that inheritance – and we can be the same.

We have an inheritance – an inheritance in Christ – we are heirs, co-heirs with Him. You believe in Jesus? Then we are one of God’s kids but sometimes we want to hang on to the rubbish, to the stuff. What’s the answer? How do we deal with that? Well, God has an answer and His answer comes in two parts. We are going to look at those in just a moment.

God Has the Answer

Well, what is God’s answer? God’s plan as we saw, as Jesus said there, is that He comes and lives with us – lives in us through His Spirit; the Holy Spirit – to have this beautiful and wonderful, intimate relationship with God, day by day. Can I encourage you – if you believe in Jesus and you are not walking in that sort of relationship today – today God is calling you into a deeper, closer more intimate relationship with Him?

But Jesus said that that relationship was for those who loved Him and He would know who loves Him because those who love Him obey Him. Yet here we see the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 7, disgusted with himself, struggling with his sin. This is what he writes – begins in chapter 7, verse 24:

Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body to death? Thanks be to God, our Lord Jesus Christ! So then with my mind I am a slave to the law of God but my flesh is a slave to the law of sin. But there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, none – because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh could not do by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin He condemned sin in the flesh so that the just requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk, not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

In other words, how does God deal with this? God has dealt with my sin and God has dealt with your sin by letting Jesus die on the cross to pay for that. Every relationship has a price. And when we look at us and God it can feel like, in this struggle that Paul has, with his own sinful nature – it can feel like we are the ones who have to pay the price all the time – we’re the ones who have to give stuff up which is hard to give up sometimes.

People who are addicted to anger, people who are addicted to gossip, people who are addicted to sexual immorality find those things hard to give up. And if feels like Jesus is saying ‘Well, if I want to a relationship with Him I have to give those things up and I am the one making the sacrifice.’ Well in a sense that’s true, but Jesus has already made the sacrifice for us. Jesus has already opened the door. Jesus died on that cross for you, Jesus died on the cross for me.

You and I are forgiven if we place our faith in Him – full stop – end of story – no arguments – no more work to be done. Every sin that I have ever committed, every sin that I will commit has been paid for in full by Jesus Christ. That’s the good news – that part is free. That’s the starting point – that’s the beginning of a clean, fresh, new relationship with the slate wiped clean.

But the problem is you and I still want to carry the garbage around. You and I still want to carry the sin around with us because that’s what our nature is. That’s our human nature – that’s exactly what Paul is struggling with in that passage.

I know what is good – I can will to do what is good, I just can’t do it. I end up doing the stuff I don’t want to do and every time I want to do good, says Paul, I find in the law that evil is right at hand.

So there has got to be a second part. We are forgiven, we are set free, nothing more needs to be done for you and I to walk boldly before God into His throne room and say ‘Father I love You, I want to be in Your presence.’ Nothing more needs to be done. But God actually wants to set us free in our lives. God wants us to be free of sin – Jesus said:

I have come to set the captives free.

That’s you, that’s me He is talking about. Halleluiah! He wants to set us free.

But look at it – He talks about here being free from the law of sin and death. “The law of the Spirit of life” – Romans chapter 8, verse 2:

the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death because God has done away with sin through Jesus. Those of us who live according to the flesh set their minds on the flesh but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.

What does that mean? God is talking here about His Spirit, about Spiritual things. Last week we looked at what Jesus said. He said:

I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you; I will send the Holy Spirit to be in you and you in Me.

And now Paul is saying, “You know something, if you believe in Jesus and if you know that Jesus died for you and if you are relying on His payment in full on the cross to be forgiven by God, there is something more. Jesus has put His Spirit in you and in me. And now Paul says it is time to walk with the Holy Spirit. Not according to the flesh, not according to that old sinful nature but walk in the Spirit.” Well how do you do that?

To set the mind on the flesh is death but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh.

In other words, if we keep on thinking about those things; if we keep on turning them over in our minds and being angry with that person and not forgiving them or whatever it is that we are addicted to in the flesh, we keep spending our intellectual time, our emotional energy thinking about those things, that’s exactly what we will end up doing.

On the other hand if we take the time that we have to think and we turn that away from those things and we put our focus on Jesus; we put our focus on the Holy Spirit; we put our focus on the Father; we put our focus on His goodness and His love and what He has done for us and what He wants to do for us, we can’t help it. We will end up doing that that stuff; we will end up living life the way God intended us to live it. See people try and change themselves; their behaviour, but at the end of the day, we can’t do that.

As clever as we are; as smart as we are; as much as God put us right on the top of the food chain on this planet, that is beyond our ability. But what is in our ability is to focus on Jesus. I remember Joyce Meyer hearing her once say ‘Where the mind goes, the man follows.’ If I focus my mind on the bad stuff, that’s where I will end up going. If I focus my mind on the good stuff; on Jesus, on the Spirit, that’s where I will end up going.

Think about the good things – think about God – pray, spend time with Him, get into the Bible, be transformed by the renewing of our minds. When we do that we are giving the Holy Spirit control of every part of us, day after day, time after time. We can try to do it on our own but we are doomed to failure because the works of the flesh will overtake us. But when we do this in faith; when we accept the Spirit’s power in faith, in the same way that we have accepted our forgiveness through what Jesus did on the cross, in faith – when we accept God’s goodness and God’s Spirit in faith and we spend time focussing on Him, listening to Him, praying with Him then God is going to change us from the inside out. It’s as sure as God made little green apples; it’s as sure as night follows day, which follows night which follows day.

I believe that Jesus died for me not only so that I could be forgiven but so that I could also be set free day by day by day, from my sin and my failures and that’s the Holy Spirit. Look at verse 11:

But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of God’s righteousness. And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit that dwells in you.

That’s God’s promise! Our job isn’t to change ourselves, our job is to get close to Jesus. Our job is to set our minds and hearts on Him, our job is, in the heat of the battle, to give Him a split second if that’s all you have, to involve Him, to give Him room to move, to draw on His power. Our job is to accept His life in faith.

And God will change us. That’s His plan – that’s His heart – that’s His promise. That’s why He sent the Holy Spirit to you and to me!

God’s heart is to make His home in us and to fill us with His joy and His peace and His grace and His power and I believe that with every fibre of my being. In fact I know it. And the other thing I know is that He wants to do that for you. Today. Right now.

We’re All Different

It is fantastic to be with you again this week on Christianityworks. You know the process of boy meets girl has always fascinated me. Before I met my wonderful wife Jacqui, somebody encouraged me to go out on a blind date with a woman and the moment I knocked on her door and she opened the door, I took one look at her and in the instant, I knew there would be no relationship there – I just knew! And yet the very first time I laid eyes on Jacqui, I just knew that she would be my wife.

How does that work? What is that chemistry all about? How does chemistry and attraction turn into love and commitment and lifelong companionship? I don’t know, I really don’t know. I guess for one person there are many potential spouses and only a handful of real candidates, and sometimes one or sometimes none that people meet. It’s really a mystery, isn’t it? how a boy and a girl meet and become husband and wife and share a life together for the whole of their lives.

The same is true with friends – you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives. And I guess that saying acknowledges this reality, that sometimes there are people with whom we have chemistry and we have relationship and yet other people – they may be similar to us, they may have the same interests – but there is just no potential there for relationship, because somehow you just don’t click. You know what I’m talking about.

Well it that’s true of people – if there is kind of a custom fit between people for having relationships what about our relationship with God? There is one God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one God – an amazing mystery of God in three persons. But what about our compatibility with God? We are all different – some of us know things in our heads; some of us know things more in our hearts; some of us are right-brained people, some of us are left brained people; some people are loud and noisy, other people are quiet and deep. For some people experience is the most important way of knowing something but for others, they just know that they know that they know that they know that they know.

Whatever it is – wherever each one of us is in terms of faith – let’s just make a couple of assumptions: firstly, that God is God and secondly that it was His idea to make us all so incredibly different. So, if that’s the case, how is it that God deals with that reality in establishing and developing a personal relationship with each one of us?

That’s what we are going to visit today on the programme. We are in the third programme of a four-week series called “The Holy Spirit and Me”. The last few weeks we have been looking at the subject of walking in the Spirit. Two weeks ago we began looking at Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised – if you want to read it it’s in John chapter 14 – He promised another Counsellor; another Advocate “just like Me”.

So Jesus did His public ministry for three and a half years and just before He went to the cross He promised His disciples:

I won’t leave you as orphans. I’ll come again. I’ll be with you through My Holy Spirit, My Father and I will come and make our homes with you.

And then He died on the cross, He rose again, He ascended into Heaven and not long after…and that’s what we are going to look at today, in the Book of Acts.

If you have a Bible, grab it; open it at Acts because that’s where we are going today. Not long after He poured His Holy Spirit out on His disciples – the Holy Spirit of grace; the Holy Spirit of power; the Holy Spirit of God in us with a relationship that we just can’t put into words. And last week on the programme we looked at one of the significant implications of having the Holy Spirit present in us, in that the Spirit who is Holy deals with our sin and that means change; that means repenting; that means ditching that rubbish in our lives. It may not be popular but the Holy Spirit gives us the power to change.

But how does the Holy Spirit deal with each one of us who are so different? And this week we are going to look at how God strikes up a relationship with us. We are all so different – God is God – God doesn’t change, so how does He do it? How does He customise or tailor His approach or is it one size fits all? Is there some kind of standard approach that is the same for each one of us? How do I know I have the Holy Spirit?

It’s amazing in the church, that the Holy Spirit is a source of great division – people’s understanding of the person of the Holy Spirit – one of the three persons in the Godhead, brings a whole bunch of misunderstanding. And we are just going to open the Bible today very simply and very plainly and just read what God says about God, the Holy Spirit.

I was sitting having dinner the other night with a really good friend of mine and this man is very well-known in ministry in Australia and around the world – God has used him to do some amazing things. And you would have to say he is a high-profile sort of person – I won’t use his name because we were having a private dinner together. But we were talking about how God deals with each one of us and I was saying. “Well, I love getting up in the morning early and spending forty-five minutes or an hour with God because God speaks to me.” You know, I find out what God is doing. “God what are You up to today?” And God gives me guidance as I do that – as I read His Word, as I listen to Him, as I pray. God just impresses on me what He wants me to do.

And this friend of mine – and people look at him from a distance; they see him on television, they hear him on radio, they read his biography and they look at this man and they say, “WOW, here’s this super-spiritual man that God has used powerfully,” and he said to me, “It doesn’t work like that for me.” He said, “You know, I go to God and ask Him, ‘What do you want me to do, God?’” And God says to me, “I have already given you a job, go and do it.”

You think, “Well, it doesn’t sound very spiritual”, but on the other hand “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. I mean, look at the fruit in this man’s life and God has clearly used him amazingly. God knows each one of us. He knows exactly what you are like. He knows exactly how to connect with you, just as He does to connect with me. So over the next twenty minutes or so we are going to spend some time looking at three different examples of how God connected with people, with the aim of getting the sense that God knows how different each one of us are. We will look at that when we come back.

A Personal Relationship

What I said earlier, that the person of the Holy Spirit is one of the greatest sources of division in the Christian church right now and it is true. On the one hand it’s very clear from the Bible that everyone who believes in Jesus has the Holy Spirit. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans chapter 8, verse 9:

Anyone one who does not have the Spirit of Christ doesn’t belong to Him.

And again in Ephesians chapter 1 and elsewhere, Paul writes along these lines – he says:

In Him, in Jesus also, when you had heard the word of truth; the Good News; the Gospel of your salvation and you believed in Him, you were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit. This is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people to the praise of His glory.

So in other words, any person that has believed in their heart that Jesus is their personal Saviour has received the Holy Spirit; the promised Holy Spirit; the Spirit that Jesus promised in John chapter 14.

Another comforter; another one just like Me, is what He said about the Holy Spirit.

But, it’s also true by observation that this Holy Spirit makes a difference in some people and not in others. Jesus said:

You will know a tree by its fruit. Good trees have good fruit and bad trees have bad fruit.

I don’t know where you are on your journey – I have a bit of a sense where I am on my journey but we are all on a journey. If we are walking with Jesus, if we have accepted Him and said, “Lord, I want You to be my Saviour, I believe that You died for me on the cross” – if we are with Jesus then somewhere in our lives, Jesus is making changes – we are on a journey.

And I know that today I make fewer mistakes that I did five years ago and my prayer is that as I grow in God’s Word and in my relationship with Him and through the presence of the Spirit in me, I pray in another five years I will be able to look back and say exactly the same thing.

But there are some people who say, “I believe in Jesus” and you look at their lives and you think ‘I can’t see any fruit.’ There is that wonderful story in Luke’s Gospel of Jesus going to His friend’s grave – Lazarus. Lazarus had died; he had been dead for a few days and when Jesus got to his grave, He said”

Roll the stone away.

And they said:

You don’t understand he has been dead for a few days, he is going to smell

And Jesus said:

Roll the stone away.

And when they did that He said:

Lazarus, come out.

And Lazarus got up from the dead and walked out but he was bound up in grave-clothes. Now under those grave-clothes there was red in his cheek – the Master had spoken life into Lazarus’s dead body.

But Lazarus was still bound up in the grave-clothes. You know, you can’t do much for God; you can’t serve other people when you are bound up in grave-clothes. And to tell you the truth, I know plenty of Christians that look just like Lazarus when he came out of the tomb. Yes, the Master has spoken life into them – yes, they have eternal life but they are still bound up in the grave-clothes of the past.

Jesus said, “I came to set you free,” and I believe that the Holy Spirit – in fact the Bible tells us the Holy Spirit has so much to do with setting us free. Some people believe that you become a Christian, you receive the Holy Spirit and that’s it! That’s one side of the argument. Other people believe, “Well, no, there is a second blessing. You know, sure you receive the seal of the Holy Spirit – you receive the Spirit when you become a Christian but you have got to be baptised in the Spirit.”

There is a significant experiential event of power, of gifts, of tongues and prophets and all those other things that happen after the event. And I know well-intentioned Christians of both sides of that argument – in both camps – who argue their cases strongly and passionately and believe that the other party is just plain wrong. Why is this important? Because it goes to the question ‘How do I know if I’m filled with the Spirit? How do I know if I’m walking in the Spirit? Because I don’t know about you, but I’m passionate – I want all that God has for me – all of Him, all of His presence, all of His blessing, all that I can do with God, I want everything that God has for me.

How incredibly sad to believe in the cross; to believe in Jesus and then to walk the rest of our lives as though nothing happened? Come on, do you want everything that God has for you? Because I tell you, God has an abundant blessing and over flowing blessing of grace and mercy and joy and peace for each person who puts their faith in Jesus.

And to understand how God approaches this, we are going to look at three very distinct; very different approaches in the Bible in the Book of Acts. The first one happens at Pentecost – let’s read it very quickly. Acts chapter 1, verses 4 and 5.

While staying with them, Jesus (this is after the resurrection and before He ascends), this is what it says: While staying with them Jesus ordered them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait there for the promise of the Father. This, He said, is what you have heard from Me for John baptised with water but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

And then in Acts chapter 2, this is what happens:

When the day of Pentecost came they were all together in one place and suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind and it filled the entire house where they were sitting and divided tongues as of fire appeared among them and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability.

One thing is clear – God poured His Spirit out on these men and women in the most amazing way. And you read on in Acts chapter 2, 3 and 4 – Peter gets up and addresses the crowd and gives the most powerful message – God filled them with His Spirit and His power. What does it show about God? He does special things – things that we don’t always understand; things that don’t always make sense to us. He did them then, He does them today – He does amazing things.

And yet He does different things too. We are going to look at two different instances of how God poured His Spirit out on people next.

We Can’t Put God in a Box

We are looking on the programme today how God touches people differently with His Holy Spirit. We have just looked at the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out on to the disciples with rushing wind and flames of fire – really unusual and amazing and maybe you and I wouldn’t have done it that way, but God did.

Have a look at this one though; this is another really interesting one. We are going to Acts chapter 19 – if you have a Bible, go there because God does things differently. Have a listen, this is in Ephesus:

While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul the Apostle, passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus where he found some disciples. He said to them “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” and they replied “No, we don’t even know that there is a Holy Spirit.” Then he said “Into what were you baptised?” and they answered “Into John’s baptism.” And Paul said “John baptised with a baptism of repentance, telling people to believe in the One who was coming after him, that is in Jesus.” On hearing this, they were baptised in the name of Jesus and then Paul laid hands on them and the Holy Spirit came upon them and they spoke in tongues and they prophesied and all together there were about twelve of them.

See, some people argue so strongly, “Well, you receive the Holy Spirit; it is a one-off thing when you become a believer”, as we saw before in the Book of Romans chapter 8 – when you become a believer you receive the Holy Spirit and that’s it! That may be how God works with some people but it’s not how He worked in Ephesus. In Ephesus, I’m sure that when these people believed in Jesus, they put their hearts into Him, they received the Holy Spirit but they had to be taught about the Holy Spirit. They didn’t know that the Holy Spirit existed and when Paul told them about it; when Paul laid his hands on them, they received the Spirit in power and they prophesied and they prayed in tongues. There was a second experience for them.

Don’t you love how God does things differently? And the third one that I would like to look at is Cornelius and his family. Let’s go to Acts chapter 10 if you have a Bible because Cornelius received the Holy Spirit in a different way.

In Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian cohort as it was called. He was a devout man who feared God with all his household and he gave generously to the poor and prayed constantly to God. One afternoon about three o’clock, he had a vision in which he clearly saw an angel coming and said to him “Cornelius!” He stared at the angel in terror “What is it Lord?” “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God.”

And so the angel told Cornelius to send some men to Peter to get Peter the Apostle to come and tell them about Jesus, which happened.

And while Peter was still talking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the Word.

So the example we looked at before, in Ephesus, those people had believed – we don’t know for how long – but they received the Holy Spirit after they believed. Here Cornelius and his family were still listening to the message of the Good News of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit fell upon them there.

See, how silly it is to have these arguments about “Well, you know, you only receive the Holy Spirit when you first believe,” or “You have to receive the Holy Spirit as a second blessing.” There are two examples where God did it differently and the one at Pentecost before, these people had walked with Jesus – they had spent three and a half years with Him, some of them, in the best Bible school you will ever come across – the Bible school of Jesus Christ. And God dealt with each of them differently.

I remember, I received the Holy Spirit the way Cornelius did. I remember when I gave my life to Jesus Christ that day, I know that I know that I know that I know that I know that I was filled with the Holy Spirit and it’s never changed for me. That joy and that peace has never left me; the courage to keep going has never left me, even through the dark times; even through the painful times; even when I felt like I was walking alone, I knew in my spirit and my heart that my God was carrying me. And that comes from the Holy Spirit.

What about you? Have you been filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit – God’s presence in you? You know that joy, that peace, that thing that happens when you all of a sudden get a revelation in your spirit and in your soul, that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Do you walk around every day in that knowledge that you are filled with the Holy Spirit? That the Holy Spirit is just overflowing out of you? Someone is listening there going “I have never experienced that, I have never tasted that, I want that,” well I am going to pray for you right now.

Father, I pray for each person who is listening right now. We are together in Your Spirit in Your Kingdom. I pray for each soul who is hungering for Your presence. I pray each person who is aching to receive Your Holy Spirit and I pray in the name of Jesus Christ that You would pour Your Spirit out on them, right here and right now. That You would fill them with the Holy Spirit, not just today but tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next, every day between now and when each one of us stands before You in glory. I pray that You would pour Your Spirit out on us in the mighty name of Jesus Christ.

Well, I know that if you prayed that prayer with me, I know that if your soul is dry and thirsty and hungry and poor and empty and just yearning to be filled with God, I know that God will honour that prayer and when we accept God for who He is, to let Him do just what He wants in our lives, just how He wants to do it in our lives, that is the most awesome and wonderful and amazing thing.

Whether we are a Cornelius and we received the Spirit and were filled to overflowing when we first heard the message or whether we are someone who has been walking for twenty or thirty years and never been filled with the Holy Spirit – it doesn’t matter – God shows up for each one of us because if we put our faith in Jesus Christ, His heart is to make His home in us and to fill us with His joy and His peace and His grace and His power and I believe that with every fibre of my being

I have seen it in other people’s lives – I have seen it in my life and I am believing for your life too. God is no man’s debtor – God has no favourites – God wants to pour His glory out in your life, in my life, in everybody’s life, who puts their faith in Jesus Christ.

Let’s come back to the question – does God have a standard way or does He customise His approach? Look at Pentecost – look at Ephesus – look at Cornelius, look at my life – look at your life. God will meet you in your place, in your life, in your need, just the way you are. I believe that and I am praying for that, for you, in Jesus Christ’s name.

God is a supernatural God – God goes ahead of us – God knows all things – God is all powerful – God is all loving and God pours out gifts through His people into other people’s lives. And that’s the powerful truth we’re going to share in today!

A Loving Dad

Let’s imagine just for a moment, that there is a father who has some children – he is their dad – in a very real sense, he created them. He loves them as a father loves his children but well, they’ve been separated from one another for a long time. He has never stopped loving them; he has never stopped thinking about them and one day they come back to him. They are reunited as a family and the father is just overjoyed. He goes to the airport to meet them; his heart is in his throat, there are tears in his eyes and like any father in that situation, he takes with him some gifts to give to these children – beautifully wrapped and especially chosen for each of them.

To give a gift in that circumstance would be completely in character for a father to do because that is what dads do because there would be love and a joy – and it just makes us want to give gifts. And since we are made in God’s image then it would be entirely reasonable to expect that God our Father would be exactly the same.

Over the last three weeks we have been working our way through a series that I’ve called “The Holy Spirit and Me”. Three weeks ago we began looking at how Jesus promised to give each person who believed in Him the Holy Spirit – another Comforter; another counsellor, just like Jesus. And then the next week we looked at the fact that, when that happens; when we accept Jesus and we are filled with His Spirit, then He begins to deal with our sin.

The Spirit is called the Holy Spirit and part of what He does in us is to help us take that rubbish out from our former life and throw it out so that we can be free to live the life that God always intended. And last week we looked at the fact that God knows each one of us intimately. He looks at you and knows you just the way you are. He looks at me and He knows me just the way I am. And so He approaches us in different ways – in ways that He chooses to build a relationship with us through His Holy Spirit.

This week we are going to finish this series off looking at the gifts of the Spirit. It turns out that the New Testament talks about three different types of gifts of the Spirit. Now I’m no Greek scholar but the Greek word that is used in the New Testament for “gift” is “charisma” – we know that word fairly well – and the Greek word that is used for ‘joy’ is almost the same word, it’s “charis” – the same sort of derivative. So they are free gifts that come from God that give joy at being reunited with Him as His children – they are free gifts and they are gifts of joy.

Let’s take a bit of time today, if you can hang around with me for a few minutes today, just to look at some of those gifts and just to get a sense of what God is doing. We can’t go through them all in detail, but just to kind of expose them and unpack them a little bit and be aware of them so that we can eagerly desire those gifts.

A gift by definition is free but we need to be ready to receive. So it is given as a gift not only to us but for the potential benefit of other people. The first lot of gifts that are talked about in the Bible happened in Romans chapter 12, verses 3 to 8 – it’s written by Paul. Let me read it to you.

For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, don’t think of yourself more highly than you should but think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as one body we have many members and not all of the members have the same function. So we who are many are one in Christ and individually we are members of one another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us – prophesy in proportion to faith, ministry in ministering, the teacher in teaching, the exhorter in exhortation, the giver in generosity, the leader in diligence, the compassionate in cheerfulness.

Now, none of those are kind of spooky, airy-fairy gifts – they are pretty straight forward gifts – to prophesy means to speak God’s will; to speak what God is thinking into a situation. We sometimes think of it as predicting the future, but most often, it’s about speaking God’s will, encouraging, admonishing into a situation. Some people have that gift.

Other people have the gift just to minister to other people. Some people have the gift of teaching. Other people have the gift of exhortation, of encouraging, of lifting them up. Other people are motivated to be givers – they are just really good at giving of their own things and wealth into other situations. Some people we know; we meet them and we go, “There is a natural gifted leader.” And some people are gifted in compassion, in mercy; they are pastorally gifted. They are the ones who will hang with someone who is sick over time.

Each one of us has one or two, or maybe even three of those in our makeup:

According to the grace that is given to each one of us, to be used for other people.

You and I have been crafted in our mother’s womb and isn’t it exciting to know, there is a gift or two or three been put into our DNA; into the fibre of who we are by God.

I encourage you to spend some time thinking about that because each one of us has some motivation – that’s why these are called motivational gifts – some motivation to speak out God’s will or to minister to others or to teach or to encourage or to give or to lead or just to show compassion. And those gifts aren’t gifts for us to hang on to; they are gifts for us to use in the lives of other people. They are gifts through which God flows into the lives of other people.

You might think, “Well, you know, I don’t have any real gift. Well, I don’t think so.” God has gifted you from the time that you were in your mother’s womb, with one of those gifts that you can use to take the blessing of God into someone else’s life – that’s what this is about. We are going to look at some of the other gifts that the Bible talks about next.

Motivational and Leadership Gifts

We are talking today in our last programme of the series “The Holy Spirit and Me” about the gifts; the spiritual gifts that God gives us through the Holy Spirit. The first lot that we looked at were what are called “motivational” gifts. They are kind of in our DNA – we all have a bent in a certain direction. For some people it is speaking out God’s will; for some people it’s encouraging; for others it’s teaching; for others it’s serving; for others it’s hanging with people in compassion and pastoring them.

That’s one lot of gifts – we all have one or two of those gifts that are wired into our DNA and I would really encourage you to get before God and say, “Lord, I’m looking at this list of gifts that You have put there in Romans chapter 12 – which one is me? God I want You to use what You have put into the fibre of my being to bless other people and to encourage other people, because God I want to be used by You.

Well, the second lot of gifts we are going to look at today come from Ephesians chapter 4 – if you have a Bible let’s go there – we are looking at Ephesians chapter 4, verses 11 to 13. These gifts are what are called “leadership” gifts – not everybody is going to be a leader but you know, sometimes we kind of sit there and we think, “Well, you know, I’m not a leader. I look around all these other people in my church and they all seem so important and special and I don’t really have anything to be a leader.”

God picks the strangest people to be leaders – God really does! You know, I look back on my walk with Jesus and I think, “Why did God ever pick me to do what I’m doing? I never expected Him too.” He comes and picks little black sheep and little ugly ducklings and little nobodies and uses them in the most powerful way. We should never kid ourselves that God doesn’t mean for us to be doing something that He has planned for us to do.

So we are here in Ephesians chapter 4, beginning at verse 11 – looking at the five leadership gifts – it says this:

The gifts we gave were that some would be apostles, some would be prophets, some would be evangelists, some would be pastors and others would be teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry for building up the body of Christ.

So there are five gifts: apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher. An apostle is simply someone who gets sent out by the body of Christ; by the church to go and do a new work. The twelve Apostles were Jesus disciples who were then ‘sent out’ to build the church – to plant new churches. Paul was an apostle, someone who was sent out and he planted a lot of new churches. Have to be a special sort of person to be one who is happy to be sent out from the group to do something new. It is a really special gifting and it’s a gifting that comes from the Holy Spirit. We don’t choose this for ourselves – God chooses it – God chooses to make someone an apostle and when you are you just know and you have a motivation to do something new and you go out and do it.

Then there are prophets – a prophet is someone who speaks God’s will into people’s lives. It’s a gifting that God has given me – not one that I chose (we’ll talk about that later) it’s not one that I chose for myself, it’s the one that God chose for me – to speak God’s will. To go to God in prayer and say, “Lord, what are You doing today” and to hear Him really clearly and then to go and speak that into peoples’ lives because that’s what God has anointed me to do.

Other people are evangelists. I have these friends Peter and Ruth and Peter and Ruth are just born evangelists and they can’t help it. They sit at a bus stop and they are talking to someone about Jesus – that’s just how they are wired – it’s how God has made them. You would never pick them as evangelists – they don’t look like Billy Graham but God has blessed them to go and do that and praise God, they do it every opportunity they get.

Some people are called to be pastors. I was having a cup of coffee yesterday with a dear friend of mine Peter Watson, who is a pastor not far from where I live and Pete was talking to me and he said “You know, I just love what I’m doing and I’m here for the long haul and doing this, doing that.” I said to Peter, “I’d die if I had to do what you do.” I’m not called to be a pastor but Pete is and a whole bunch of other people are and churches are full of people who are gifted to be pastors. And I don’t mean by that the “minister of the church” – I mean by that the sort of person who just pulls along and hangs with people for the long term and just hangs there and is with them and walks with them; who pastors them – as a shepherd pastors a flock. There is a real gifting; it’s a real calling; it’s a real anointing and a lot of times pastors don’t look to be anything special and they’re the most important people in my view, in the body of Christ.

And then some people are called to be teachers – that’s what I am doing now. My two gifting are in the area of prophesy and teaching. If we were all teachers it would be boring – fortunately God only picks a few.

These are the leadership giftings – they are not for all – but their role is to build the body of Christ. We are now going to look at the last grouping of giftings which are called spiritual giftings. If you have a Bible, go and grab it, open it at First Corinthians chapter 12 and we will read it together.

We are talking today about spiritual gifts and God is a Dad; He is our Dad and His heart is to give good gifts to His children. If we, who are imperfect, know how to give good gifts to our kids, how much more will our Dad in heaven give the Holy Spirit to us when we ask Him? And with the Holy Spirit come gifts – gifts that are about who we are but they are what God does through us to bless other people.

We have talked about the motivational gifts in Romans chapter 12; we have talked about the leadership giftings in Ephesians chapter 4 and now we are moving on to the spiritual gifts – these are supernatural gifts – not magic – these gifts come from the Holy Spirit. Flick with me, if you have a Bible, to First Corinthians chapter 12.

Now concerning spiritual gifts, (First Corinthians chapter 12, verse 1), brothers and sisters, I don’t want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray by idols who couldn’t speak, therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed’ and no can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.

Now there is a variety of gifts of the same Spirit and there are a variety of services but the same Lord and there are varieties of activities but the same God who activates all of them in everyone.

To each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit, the utterance of wisdom, to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the same Spirit, to another working of miracles, to another prophesy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues and to another, the interpretation of tongues. All of these are activated by one and the same Spirit who allots to each one individually, just as the Spirit chooses.

These are spiritual gifts that come from the Holy Spirit and they are not for super Christians, they are not for special Christians – it says here:

To each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

Believe in Jesus? God’s plan is to manifest His Spiritual gifts in you and through you just as His plan is to do that with me.

Now there are a variety of gifts. Sometimes it is an utterance of wisdom, sometimes it is walking into a situation and discerning what is going on and you just feel God give you this wisdom that you never had and you speak it and everyone goes “Man, that’s amazing.” And sometimes it’s a word of knowledge – sometimes we can’t know what is going on in someone’s life but the Holy Spirit just leads us to speak something and it’s bang on. Sometimes it is the most supernatural faith in the most difficult of circumstances.

Sometimes God says, “Go and heal that person because I am healing them – go and put your hands on them – go and pray for them.” The Spirit is about healing lives. Sometimes it’s working in miracles – sometimes it’s a prophesy; it’s a word from God that people just know has come from God. Sometimes it is discerning spirits – the devil is alive and well. And sometimes it’s praying in tongues – one of the very common gifts.

Now they are wonderful, wonderful gifts but the most important thing, if you read the next couple of chapters of First Corinthians, which we are not going to, is that we should pursue love. We should – yes, strive for spiritual gifts because God wants to give them to each one – but the most important thing is that we walk in love.

If you flick over to chapter 14 and verse 12, it says this:

So with yourselves, since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for the building up of the church.

Now I am challenged by this; I am a very right-brained, analytical kind of guy and I had a prophesy given to me by telephone from a friend. She rang one Saturday morning and said ‘God has just given me Romans chapter 12, verse 6 and that says:

Prophesy according to your faith.

Now the night before I had been at Bible College and one of our lecturers Dr Barry Chant, whom I have just so much time for, said “Today we are going do prophesy.” And I’m thinking, “Barry, it doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t work like this. Hang on a minute.” So I challenged him and he smiled at me knowingly and he sat me down with a young man and he said, “Prophesy into this man’s life.” I thought, “Barry, come on.” Barry said, “just start praying for him” and so I did and God led me in a direction to pray for this young man and I opened my eyes when I finished praying and he was sobbing – he was in tears because I prayed and spoke something into his life that I couldn’t have known, that was the biggest issue in his life right then. And Barry put his hand on my shoulder and had this knowing smile.

God gave me that day, even though I didn’t ask for it, the gift of prophesy and prophesy for me is never easy. It’s not something that comes lightly; not something that I open my mouth over easily, but when God calls me to prophesy; to speak His very specific will into some situation into someone’s life, I just know. And so I go and do that and I see how God does the most amazing things. I have seen people blessed time and time again. That’s the spiritual gift that God seems to give to me most often.

Now, I would really like one of the flashy gifts like healing – that would be good. I’d love to be able to go along and lay my hands on people and heal them all the time but it just seems that the place God calls me into, being who I am and how He has made me, is in this area of prophesy. And it is so wonderful to see that step of faith – and that’s what it is for me each time because it’s always a bit scary to do – to prophesy into people’s lives and see God use that and see lives touched and changed.

This is not the gift I had planned for myself, yet, we don’t get to choose.

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. All of these are activated by the one and the same Spirit who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

This is a gift from God and if we start taking gifts on ourselves saying, “I’m going to be a healer,” and God hasn’t put that in us, then, we are going to abuse that, we are going to make mistakes and we are going to hurt people.

God is a good God – God is a supernatural God – God goes ahead of us – God knows all things – God is all-powerful – God is all loving and God pours out gifts through His people into other people’s lives. Sometimes they are unusual; sometimes they are scary; sometimes it’s a huge step of faith to lay your hands on someone and pray for their healing.

But when God is doing something; when God has shown up, you know something? You and I had better be there along with Him otherwise He will use someone else. Our Father is a Father of joy; He’s a good Father. He wants to give us good gifts – they are free gifts – to each one of us – you! You believe in Jesus? God means to use you supernaturally in other people’s lives – it’s a fabulous plan. And, yes, you know something? It takes a bit of faith but God knows that too and He knows where we are at in our faith.

Prophesy happens according to faith – my gift is a faith gift and I just believe that when I open my mouth, I am only doing it in His power. I won’t open my mouth in my own strength and God, time and time again has done that. What if God plans to use you to heal people’s lives? What if God plans to use you to put words of knowledge or words of wisdom into other people’s lives? You know, if we are not co-operating with God, it’s not going to happen – He is not going to drag us kicking and screaming.

It says here that we should ‘eagerly desire’ spiritual gifts and excel in those spiritual gifts. We have looked at three types of gifts today – motivational gifts, Romans chapter 12, verses 3 to 7; leadership gifts, Ephesians chapter 4, verses 11 to 13; spiritual gifts, First Corinthians chapter 12, verse 1 to 11.

God is a good God – God wants to bless people. You know He sent Jesus to this planet not just to speak but to walk on water, to heal people, to give sight to the blind, to cast demons out, to die and rise again – God is a supernatural God – God touches lives supernaturally.

Father I pray for each person listening that You would give us a desire for Your spiritual gifts; a desire for Your Spirit to flow through us; a desire for this world to be blessed by Your Spirit through us. In Jesus name I pray, Amen.